Smithsonian.com

Cold Comfort

To prepare for his first night at Sweden's Icehotel, our writer
Rudy Chelminski bundled up in a massive snowsuit and huge double
boots. Unlikely as it seems, the hotel's name suggests exactly what
it is: a hotel made of ice. Unheated. One hundred and twenty-five
miles north of the Arctic Circle. It's got more than 60 rooms and
suites, a bar, reception area and chapel made entirely out of ice.

Mark Armstrong, a 28-year-old Englishman with a degree in
architecture from Oxford, showed Chelminski around. Armstrong is
one of only a handful of experts in the understandably limited
field of meltable architecture. Earlier ice palaces, built of
rectangular ice blocks and soaring impressively high, were designed
to be contemplated from outside. In contrast, the Icehotel is all
insides: low-slung, snug and fully enclosed. Everywhere are
load-bearing arches with no straight walls in sight. Buried in the
walls are cleverly concealed 10-watt halogen lamps, which make the
hotel glow with a cool indirect luminescence. More than 20
international artists have decorated rooms with fanciful ice
sculptures.

Icehotel is the brainchild of a Swede named Yngve Bergqvist, who
built a big igloo as an offbeat venue for an art exhibition. The
Icehotel took off from there and now measures some 6,456 square
feet and entertains more than 8,000 visitors annually.
International recognition came when a vodka maker realized the
value of the imagery of a bottle of iced vodka on a bar of ice.
Every year, the Icehotel hosts several major fashion shoots. And,
every spring, the hotel melts and must be built again.